The group is a bit smaller these days, just one buddy. We're doing some XP gaming. I got Battlefield 1942 running here, with the Battlegroup 42 mod. My Dimension E510 can really handle up to BG42 version 1.35b, but apparently they aren't hosting that on ModDB anymore. I had to find it on some shady ancient Russian file hosting site. But I got there in the end.
This is the first time out for my Precision 690, I've been working on it for about a month. I rescued it from a rage room, it was going to get beat to scrap. I asked, and they gave it to me! I swapped the single Xeon 5160 for Xeon 5355's. 2gb of ram for 32gb. The crappy display adapter for a GTX 980TI. It is an XP era powerhouse. I have not gotten XP x64 running on it yet, but it's running Mint 22.1 like a champ. I put an XP theme on it until I can dual boot the real thing. I am super stoked this thing is running. Mint might be the better option for it, actually! Good 32bit compatibility with Wine and Lutris, and full use of the 32gb of ram and 8 cores.
I played so many hours of the Desert Combat, Battlefield 1942 mod.
https://battlefield.fandom.com/wiki/Desert_Combat
I love DC. I was the only one of my buddies that could fly the helicopters well.
I have a very specific memory of coming in with a jet to shoot one of my buddies in a chopper. Then he does a damn barrel roll, dropping well out of my cone of fire almost instantly.
The helicopters in Desert Combat gave you a ton of control. They were a quite simplistic compared to DCS, which is where I get my aircraft fix now, but I really enjoyed the wild shit you could pull with them if you got good.
Desert Combat was so good man. So much time spent as a kid trying to master flying helicopters in it.
It's crazy that this mod is kind of the foundation of the entire modern Battlefield landscape seeing as its devs got hired by DICE for Battlefield 2.
Really? Wow, that's pretty awesome.